14 Best Mother Daughter Movies and TV Shows to Watch Together

Some stories just know how to find you. The wedding dress has a zipper. A hospital waiting room. A daughter goes to college with a mother who pretends to be alive. One minute you’re staring at strangers, and the next you’re texting your mom at 11pm on a Tuesday for no reason you can explain.

The Best Mother-Daughter Relationships on TV

These 14 movies and shows will do just that. Some of the relationships you recognize immediately—the mother who is the best friend, complicated, where no one can say what they really mean. Some are the ones you didn’t know you needed until you did.

Donna and Sophie, Mama Mia!

Donna and Sophie are the youngest mother and daughter in their world—and the movie doesn’t let you forget that. The scene where Donna helps Sophie into her wedding dress is the one we get, every time, without fail. Technically, Mama Mia! is something a movie about fathers, but it’s really about what it’s like when a mother raises a daughter alone and somehow, improbably, gets it right.

Rory and Lorelai, Gilmore Girls

Lorelai and Rory are the gold standard of a mom’s best friend—a fast-talking, coffee-addicted, and completely dependent partner in a way that somehow (almost) never feels unhealthy. The show spans the years of their lives and manages to make every stage feel real: teenage angst, college graduation, the slow realization that your mom was right more than you wanted to admit.

Anna and Tess, It’s scary Friday

Anna and Tess can’t stand each other—until they’re forced to live inside each other for a day, when they realize they’re not so different. It’s a comedy first, but the minute it stops being a joke is the minute it hits. A switch is more of a structural device. It’s a very real version of what every mother and daughter eventually has to think about: you don’t know what it’s like to be her.

Daphne, Maggie, Mae, and Milly, Because I Said So

Daphne meddles in her young daughter’s love life in a kind, hyper-directed way that will make you laugh until you see it. The film is simple, but it earns its place on this list for one reason: it’s a very honest portrayal of a mother who loves her daughter so completely that she can’t figure out how to let her be human. Every daughter has heard that. Many of them have also, finally, figured it out.

Xo and Jane, Jane the Virgin

Jane and Xo are only 16 years apart, which means they grew up together the way they did each other—and the show knows exactly what to do with that. What makes it extraordinary is the third layer: Xo’s mother, Alba, whose presence turns every mother-daughter dynamic on the show into a conversation across three generations. You watch it and start doing the math on your family without saying it.

Tami and Julie, Friday Night Lights

Tami Taylor is the kind of mom that makes you want to be a better person—principled, warm, and completely disinterested in loving when you’re right is the most important thing. His relationship with Julie is the truest portrayal of a beautiful mother and difficult daughter on this list. Julie is frustrated in the way only daughters who have everything they need can be, and Tami loves her anyway, regardless. That’s the part that gets you.

Marmee, Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth, Little Women

Let Machi rule this story—his daughters rule—but remove him and the whole thing will collapse. You lead by example so quietly that you don’t realize it until you’re being shaped by it, which can be either a successful parent or the most painful thing to grow up with, depending on the day. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation earns all your tears.

Rebecca and Kate, This is us

Rebecca and Kate’s relationship is hard to watch because it’s hard to watch—loved and loaded in equal measure, spanning decades in a way that makes neither of them reducible to a single version of themselves. The show gives you Rebecca as a young mother, a middle-aged mother, and an older one, and the juxtaposition of all three is what breaks you. You’ll end the episode convinced that you need to call your mom right away and that you need a minute alone first.

Lady Bird and Marion, Miss Bird

Christine (she insists on Lady Bird) wants out of Sacramento, out of her mother’s house, and out of everything Marion expected of her, and the movie never once suggests that she’s wrong about that. What it does instead is show you a side of Marion with equal generosity, which is what makes this film a disaster rather than a good one. The last three minutes will rearrange something for you.

Mia and Pearl, Elena, Izzy, and Lexi, Small Fires Everywhere

Mia and Pearl are a team in the way that only single mothers and daughters sometimes are—single, loyal, and completely unprepared for what happens when the outside world intrudes. Elena and her daughters are the opposite: a mother who loves her children within a plan they never agree with. The show puts these two versions of motherhood in direct conflict and doesn’t let either of them go. It’s uncomfortable in the best way.

Kate and Marah, Tully and Cloud, Firefly Lane

This one works on two tracks at once: Kate’s strong, tender relationship with her daughter, and Tully’s lifelong reckoning with the mother who never made it. One is to show what it looks like when the love is there, but the connection ends. One shows you the mother who would never appear. Together, they make the case that no matter what your relationship with your mother looks like, you’re probably not as alone in it as you think.

Jackie, Isabel and Anna, You are a stepmother

Jackie dies and she knows it, which means she spends the movie doing the most selfless thing a mother can do: preparing someone else to love her children after she’s gone. A film about competition becomes a film about self-sacrifice without seeing change. The scene where he tells his daughter the things she will miss is what ends it.

Aurora and Emma, Terms of Love

Aurora and Emma spend the first half of the film going crazy, and the second half proves that nothing matters. It spans 30 years of a mother-daughter relationship and tackles all the stages—the despair, the slow comeback, and the moment you realize your mother is the only person you’ve ever truly understood. It’s not a light watch, but it’s totally worth it.

M’lynn and Shelby, Steel Magnolias

Everything on this list was built for this one. Lynn and Shelby have a love that is there at full capacity—present at every moment, every decision, every outcome—that makes what happens to them impossible to prepare for, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. The graveyard scene is one of the greatest acting scenes ever put on film, and it will leave you devastated in a way that somehow still feels like a gift. Watch it with your mom if you can.

This post was last updated on May 29, 2026, to include new information.